Anne Panning’s short story collection, Super America, won The 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She has also published a book of short stories, The Price of Eggs (Coffeehouse Press, 1992), as well as short fiction and nonfiction in places such as The Kenyon Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The South Dakota Review, The Florida Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kalliope, Quarterly West, The Laurel Review, Under the Sun, and forthcoming in Five Points and Cimarron Review. Her essay “Specs: My Life in Eyeglasses” was listed as a Notable Essay The 2006 Best American Essays; another essay “Secondhand” was listed as Notable in The 2007 Best American Essays. Originally from Minnesota, Anne has lived in The Philippines, Vietnam, Hawaii, northern Idaho and Ohio; she now lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children, and teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

She is currently working on two writing projects: 1) a novel, Carrot Lake, and 2) a memoir, Viet*Mom: An American Mother of Two Moves to the Mekong, of which “The Good Life in Vietnam” is an excerpt.